Background/introduction High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) surgery often requires hours of ablation in order to treat an entire tumor. Both perfluorocarbon gaseous microbubbles and vaporized liquid droplets are known enhancers of HIFU thermal ablation. Microbubbles, however, often lead to surface or skin lesions. Furthermore, they have a relatively short half-life in vivo (minutes) render...

The potential of high‐intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) will not be realized unless the effects of overlaying tissues are understood in such a way that allows for estimation of HIFU dose distribution at a target tissue. We employ computational models to examine the impact of phase aberration on tissue ablation. Thompson and Roberts have recently studied the effects of phase aberration on ultr...

BACKGROUND The lesions induced by high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) thermal ablations are particularly difficult to simulate due to the complexity of the involved phenomena. In particular, boiling has a strong influence on the lesion shape. Thus, it must be accounted for if it happens during the pulses to be modeled. However, no acoustic model enables the simulation of the resulting wave...

BACKGROUND Breast fibroadenomata (FAD) are the most common benign lesions in women. For palpable lesions, there are currently three standard treatment options: reassurance (with or without follow-up), vacuum-assisted mammotomy (VAM) or surgical excision. High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) ablation has been used in the treatment of FAD. The drawback of HIFU is its prolonged treatment durat...

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a noninvasive treatment that induces complete coagulative necrosis of a tumor at depth through the intact skin. We evaluated a biochemical disease-free rate, safety and morbidity for localized prostate cancer treated with HIFU. A total of 132 consecutive patients with stage T1c-2N0M0 localized prostate cancer underwent HIFU using Sonablate-500 (Focus ...

Q Can you update us on your research group’s current work? At the moment, I am occupying three positions in The Netherlands. For 60% of my time I am at the Utrecht University (Utrecht, The Netherlands), for 20% at the University Medical Centre Utrecht hospital (UMCU; Utrecht, The Netherlands), and the other 20% I am at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands), in the east of the cou...

In recent years, noninvasive thermal treatment by using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has high potential in tumor treatment. The goal of this research is to develop an ultrasound imaging-guided robotic HIFU ablation system for tumor treatment. The system integrates the technologies of ultrasound image-assisted guidance, robotic positioning control, and HIFU treatment planning. With t...

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a non-invasive technology, which can be used occlude blood vessels in the body. Both the theory underlying and practical process of blood vessel occlusion are still under development and relatively sparse in vivo experimental and therapeutic data exist. HIFU would however provide an alternative to surgery, particularly in circumstances where serious c...

INTRODUCTION Curative treatments for localized prostate cancer, from least invasive to most invasive, include brachytherapy, cryosurgery, three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy, external beam radiation therapy, and radical prostatectomy. A patient with localized, low risk or intermediate risk prostate cancer who is diagnosed at an early age and receives one of these treatments has only a...

Ultrasound is a good tool for theranostics due to have multi-potency both of diagnostics with sonography and therapeutics with high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). In addition, microbubbles and nanobubbles are utilized as not only contrast imaging agent but also enhancer of drug and gene delivery by combination of ultrasound. Recently, we developed novel liposomal nanobubbles (Bubble lipos...